The Darrow-Kennedy Debate on "Is The Human Race Permanently Progressing Toward A Better Civilization?": Affirmative: Professor John C. Kennedy. Negative: Mr. Clarence S. Darrow

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"Is t h e H u m a n R a c e P e r m a n ently Progressing t o w a r d a B e t t e r Civilization?"

Afirmati~e:

Professor John C. Kennedy Nepati~e:

Mr. Clarence S. Darrow

Mr. Arthur M. Lewis Chairman

at the G.4RRICIi THEATRE, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, MARCH 23, 1919, at 2:30 JIaclasliey cSs Jlaclaskey, Court reporter^ Chicago.

JOHN K. HIQQIIYB. PBINTgB

376-380

WEST

BIONRO% ST.

IS THE HUMAN RACE PERMANENTLY PROGRESSING TOWARD A BETTER CIVILIZATION? Mr. Lewis: This debate this afternoon is between two friends of this Society, whom you have heard before. It has some direct relation to a preceding debate. Our friends both came to the conclusion that their various points of difference belonged in the domain of the philosophy of life and society. So this afternoon they are going to discuss the question as to whether or not the human race is progressing toward a better civilization. Our friend, Professor John Curtis Kennedy, who was professor for some time at the University of Chicago and who is now alderman of the 27th ward, will take the affirmative; and our oft-tried and always loyal friend of this Society, Mr. Clarence S. Darrow, will take the negative. This will be the last time we shall be able to hear our good friend Kennedy on this stage for some time. I do not suppose we can hear him next year. He is going to ramble around the world and see what is doing-and, of course, there is a great deal doing, now, and I would not mind going along with him. I am sure we shall all regret his departure as a loss to the city of Chicago, and a loss to us, but I am sure we all hope after he has been away awhile he will feel a longing to return, and will reappear in our midst. And I can promise him when he does return, if he decides to, that we will give him a royal reception. I shall now call upon Mr. Kennedy to open the debate. PROFESSOR KENNEDY'S

FIRST SPEECH.

Professor Kennedy said: Mr. Chairman, Mr. Darrow, Comrades and Friends: Lester F. Ward has defined social vrogress as. "Whatever increases the sum total of human havpiness." For the purpose of this debate I am willing to accept this definition given by Mr. Ward and to endeavor to show that social evolution has been following along lines which, on the whole, have been increasing the sum total of human havviness. There are certain conditions which I think .. all of us will agree to be necessary for the advancement of human happiness.

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In the first place, for most of us, at least, it is necessary to have a good subsistence, to have the necessaries of life before we can enjoy any great amount of happiness. We must have plenty of food-a variety of food; must have adequate clothing and shelter. These are fundamental requisites for happiness for the masses of the people.

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DARROW-KEN NEDY DEEATE.

Then, again, we need freedom; freedom to pursue some line of activity which gives us satisfaction; freedom of thought; freedom of expression; freedom to develop our personality so that our various talents and capacities will have an opportunity to manifest themselves. In addition to this freedom, if we are to enjoy happiness, I think most of us must have leisure-we must have the time to enjoy the fine arts, to enjoy music, sculpture, painting, literature, the drama-we must have the time, opportunity and means to travel and enjoy the beauties of Nature. These are some of the requirements of happiness for the human race. And just insofar as any civilization makes it possible for an increasingly large number of people to get the necessities of life, to enjoy freedom, selfexpression, to participate in the fine arts, and enjoy the fine arts, I would say that we are making progress toward a higher civilization. Now. there have been a number of civilizations concerning which we have a great deal of recorded history. Most of those civilizations have gone through certain stages of evolution. As a rule they originate in what is known as the stage of savagery. After many years the peoples of these various civilization succeeded in rising above that stage of savagery into a condition called barbarism. Out of barbarism they grew into what is commonly called civilization. Such has been the history of the Egyptian civilization, for example, which existed for some five or six thousand years that we know of. Such was the history of the BabyIonian civilization, which existed three or four thousand years. Such was the history of the Greek civilization which existed for a shorter period, perhaps, only for a thousand years, and the Roman civilization which existed for only about a thousand years. Such has been, in a large measure, the history of the civilization in which we now find ourselves which might be called the Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic civilization, reaching back to the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic tribes. The civilization which has been developed in the Western European countries and in America has been a civilization which took something from all the previous civilizations--some of the good points and some of the bad points from each. As a rule all of these civilizations have gone through practically the same course. They have originated in savagery and have developed, stage after stage, to something approximating the kind of a civilization which we now enjoy. And if it were true that recorded history simply showed that this process was being repeated over and over again, if it were true that the peoples in different parts of the world started in savagery and ran the gamut up to a certain form of civiliza-

I;ENI\TEDY'S

FIRST

SPEECH.

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tion and then lost everything, and sunk into savagery again, and had to make way before another group who were savages -I think if that were the case, Mr. Darrow might very fairly maintain that there was no permanent advancement in civilization; that there was simply a certain cycle through which people run and we will suffer the same fate that other peoples have in previous historic epochs. But, in my opinion, the histories of peoples do not sustain that position. So far as I can see, every cvilization takes over something of the preceding civilization, and this is especially true of the civilization in which we live and of which we are a part; in fact, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that practically everything worth while achieved by the people in any previous civilization has been taken in and utilized by our present civilization. Everything achieved by the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans, and a great deal of what has been achieved by the Chinese and Japanese has been made a part of the civilization of the European countries and America. What are some of the advantages that have been gained by the development of modern civilization? What really has been achieved? Wherein has the sum total of the happiness of the human race been increased? I suppose I might in a way compare the savage state with the present state of mankind in order to bring out the difference-the contrast between the conditions under which savages lived and the conditions under which we live. That perhaps would take too much time, if I attempted to give the details; and again, even if I did give the details, some of you might say we have heard you before, and as a socialist. we know what you have already condemned-capitalistic civilization. We have heard you describe the poverty and the misery; we have heard you picture the extent of crime and of lunacy and of prostitution, and all the horrors of war, and the tyranny of the present civilization. How can you say, in view of the position you have previously taken as a socialist in condemning the capitalistic order, that to be a savage was worse-that the present capitalistic civilization is any better? Well, I am perfectly willing to face that proposition frankly and squarely; in fact, that is just the reason I am here today. If I did not believe that the human race had made any progress whatever up to today, I would not have much hope for the future. If I could not point out wherein even the present capitalistic order is superior to the life which, was enjoyed by the savage; if I could not show that on the whole people today are enjoying a better life than they did in the days gone by under savagery, then I would not have much hope that

any time in the future they would enjoy a better life. So, perhaps, the best way to get at the crux of the matter is to compare our present civilization with the civilization of the savage or his lack of civilization; at least, on a few of the important points. One of the best authorities that I know of. when it comes to observation and reporting upon the conditions of people, was Charles Darwin. For one thing, he was very accurate in his observations, and secondly, he was very truthful. So far as I know, his truthfulness has never been questioned. So, therefore, I want to read to vou a Dassace - or two describinnsavagery as he saw it in some of the primitive places he visited in his Voyage on the Beagle around the world. This will take werhaws three of four minutes to read. but inasmuch as it is an entirely trustworthy account of savage life and gives us a basis upon which to make our comparison, I think it is worth while to read it. H e says: "While going one day on shore near Wollaston Island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere These Fuenians in the canoe were quite beheld. naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. In another harbor not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there out of mere curiosity, while the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked baby! These poor wretches were stunted in their growth. their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men. one can hardlv make one's self believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy; how much more reasonablv the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians! At night, five or six human beings. naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, winter or summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shell-fish from the rocks: and the women either dive to collect seaeggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line without any hook, jerk out little fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale discovered, it is a feast; and such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi.

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"They often suffer from famine:

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heard Mr. Low,

a sealing-master intimately acquainted with the natives

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of this country, give a curious account of the state of a party of one hundred and fifty natives on the west coast, who were very thin and in great distress. A succession of gales prevented the women from getting shell-fish on the rocks, and they could not go out in their canoes to catch seal. A small party of these men one morning set out. and the other Indians e x ~ l a i n e dto him that they were going a four days' journey for food; on their return, Low went to meet them, and he found them excessively tired, each man carrying a great square piece of putrid whale's blubber with a hole in the middle, through which they put their heads, like the Gauchos do through their ponchos or cloaks. As soon as the blubber was brought into a wigwam, an old man cut off thin slices, and muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to the famished party, who during this time preserved a profound silence. Mr. Low believed that whenever a whale is cast on shore, the natives bury large pieces of it in the sand, as a resource in time of famine; and a native boy, whom he had on board, once found a stock thus buried. The different tribes when at war are cannibals. From the concurrent but quite independent evidence of the boy taken by Mr. Low, and of Jemmy Button, it is certainly true that, when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs; the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, 'Doggies catch otters, old women no.' This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we were told that they often run away into the mountains. but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides!"

I have taken the trouble to read this because it describes the condition of human b e i n ~ sin the savase state; not only the group that Darwin saw. but as a11 anthropologists agree it is a characteristic stage through which human beings nass when they are in this savPqe stste. And. it is a stpte from which, so far as we are able to learn from the best of anthropologists, all peoples have risen and developed, whether they

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DARRObV-IiEN NEDT DEB.4TE.

be oriental or occidental peoples. If you run back the history far enough it always run back to this kind of savagery. Now, bad as conditions are today; great as poverty is today; great as the misery is today, I ask you how many of you would like to go back to the condition that these people were in, whom Darwin describes? And how many of the people are there you know, even under capitalism, who would exchange the position they find themselves in, with the position of those savages who had no certainty as to food or clothing or shelter. who had no freedom which they could call real freedom, because they never knew what was going to be their condition on the next day, and who knew nothing whatever of the arts, of literature and of the achievements which to us make life worth while? Now, it seems to me that tracing evolution from those conditions to the present, we can see how, step by step, we have won something worth while. And this is a significant fact, that you can judge the advancement of a civilization by the tools and by the methods of production which are used by that civilization in order to secure a livelihood. Undpr the most primitive conditons they have to live by fishing, hunting, to live off whatever they can pick up practically without the use of tools and without any great knowledge with which to control their environment. But, mankind advances out of this stage, first by learning the use of fire; then by domesticating animals; then by learning the primitive methods of agriculture, and gradually by a development of knowledge regarding the forces of Nature, man learns how to get from Nature a larger and a better living and a more certain living. So that, if you compare the condition of mankind today with that of the savage, so far as subsistence is concerned. and that is fundamental. vou can sav today we have a vastly greater variety; we have a greater quantity; w have a far greater degree of security so far as the great mass of the people is concerned. I am aware, of course, of the fact that during certain conditions, as for example, durine the war in Eurove.. there will be conditions of famine. Yet taking the capitalistic system as it has prevailed during the last hundred years, it cannot be denied that the millions of people living under that civilization have had a far greater security so far as livlihood is concerned, a far greater variety of food stuffs than thev would have had under the conditions that prevailed during the period of savagery. Then, when you come to the second test of advancement, the freedom of the individual, the opportunity to develop one's personality, to have freedom of thought and freedom of expression, we find again that the savages and barbarians

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were bound much more strictly than the civilized man of today. They had their fetishism; their superstitions; they were enslaved by their fears, their ignorance and superstitions so that they did things and lead a life which was anything but a free life. The average person pictures to himself the free Indian; the free Barbarian, the free savage, as one who can do as he pleases and go where he pleases. Not so. They were bound, a s anthropologists prove, beyond any question, by all sorts of superstitions; all sorts of customs and all sorts of traditions which made it impossible for the individual to express any individuality whatever. H e lost his individuality under the rules of customs and traditions of the tribe. So, this primitive freedom is a false idea, as we find when we make an actual study of the life of these savages. It has been done by Lewis Morgan who lived for many years among the Iroquois Indians, and by other students who have studied ,the conditions at first hand. To illustrate what some of those conditions are, I select one or two examples from Herbert Spencer's Sociology. H e gives dozens of them to illustrate how the primitive peoples are bound by their superstitions. For example, he says, speaking of some of the Mexican Indians: "Ximinez tells us regarding the Indians of Vera Paz that 'when a lord was dying they immediately killed as many slaves as he had, that they might precede him and prepare the house for their master." "In Dahomey immediately the king dies his wives begin to destroy all his furniture and things of value, as well as their own: and to murder one another. On one occasion two hundred and eighty-five of the women were thus killed before the new king could stop it." "Savages and barbarians also frequently bury most or all of the valuable property with the deceased." I will not burden you with example after example of this sort. We know how the Hindoos for example, had the custom of throwing their children in some cases into the Ganges River and other rivers, as a sort of religious sacrifice to propitiate the wrath of the gods. These customs have existed among savage peoples. But, we have largely outgrown them. I want to read to you to show you how recently these superstitions have prevailed among peoples a citation from Andrew D. White's work on "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom". People of the middle ages were governed by the same superstition believing it was a religious duty to carry out some of the most atrocious performances. Here is a case showing how some of the Christians persecuted the Jews:

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But this sort of theological reasoning developed an idea far more disastrous, and this was that Satan, in causing pestilences, used as his emissaries especially Jews and witches. The proof of this belief in the case of the Jews was seen in the fact that they escaped with a less percentage - of disease than did the Christians in the nreat plague periods. This was doubtless due in some measure to their remarkable sanitary system, which had probably originated thousands of years before in Egypt, and had been handed down through Jewish lawgivers and statesmen. Certainlv thev observed more careful sanitarv rules and more constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among - Christians: but the ~ u b l i cat large - could not understand so simple a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted from protection by Satan. and that this ~rotectionwas r e ~ a i dand the. Destilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and to stop the plague by torturing and murdering the Jews. Thro,ughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the time of the Black Death, it is computd that twelve thousand Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is said to have been three thousand: in Strasburn. -. the Rue Brulee remains as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for poisoning the wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood. and in a single dav one hundred and sixtv - "Tews were burned. Evervwhere in continental Europe this mad persecution went on. Let me give you another illustration-a paragraph or two regarding the persecution of so-called witches: .2

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As to witches. the reasons for believin~them the cause of pestilence glso came from fear. his-belief, too, had been poured mainly from Oriental sources into our sacred books and thence into the early Church, and was strengthened by a whole line of Church authorities, fathers, doctors, and saints; but. above all, by the great bull, Summis Desiderantes, issued by Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches are a meat cause of disease storms, and various ills which afflict humanity; and the Scripture on which the action recommended against witches in this papal bull, as well as in

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